Smell of Change…

Archive for the category “CURTAIN RAISER”

The date changes, the venue changes, the face changes but the scene remains the same – this time, with the visit of Indian PM Narendra Modi in Australia, it was time for the Indian-Australians living in Down Under to be Modi-fied. The TV cameras, unmounted from the Madison Square Garden, New York had been shipped by Indian media houses to Sydney, ten thousand miles away, where they were repositioned at different venues to pan across a different continent but the men behind them knew that the people facing them were hardly going to be any different. Soon the cameras were in action shooting the same zeal, fervor and frenzy among the Indians that was visible in New York during the visit of Narendra Modi in America. The lingering chant of ‘Modi-Modi’ plays as a ubiquitous background score whichever part of the globe Modi visits now a days.

To borrow from the Song of Australia, they say:

“There is a land where, floating free,

From mountain-top to girdling sea,

A proud flag waves exultingly”

The proud flag, however, that floated free in Australia in past few days, as visible on our TV screen, was not the defaced blue ensign of Australia but our own desi ‘tiranga’ that waved exultingly all around the places Modi visited. People boisterously waved these flags while celebrating the metamorphosis of a grassroot karyakarta of BJP into a jet-set political rockstar performing at the grandest of global stages. ‘Australia – the idle fancy of a dream’ was metamorphosed into a desi territory.

The visit of Narendra Modi to any foreign country is turned into festivals for the Indians living there. People prepare for the act for days – they organize grand welcome receptions for the PM, plan holidays, come out in traditional dresses, choreograph dance-song sequences and try to showcase their love for India in the best of traditions. The sight of Indians draping themselves in tricolours and bursting into “mere desh ki dharti sona ugale ugale heere moti” each time the camera approached them in cities of USA or Australia, was truly bemusing. All fault-lines along the lines of region, religion, language or culture that refuses to die in India, stood evaporated during such occasions and all Indians came out united in the spirit of oneness. Their common sentiments for their motherland happened to be the one emotive bond that erased all their tangible differences and made them stand shoulder to shoulder in celebrations of their identity as one Indian.

It is interesting to analyze why these successful overseas Indians throng to Narendra Modi in a way they’ve never done during visits of other Indian leaders ever before. Is it his popularity or his charisma or a belief in his ability as a leader or simply his street-smart demagogy that connects instantly with made-in-Harvard professionals and made-in-Hissar bumpkins alike? Has it got something to do with his wonderful abilities to connect not only as a sly conversationalist but also as a suave social media user? Yes, definitely all of these have their share in pushing up his popularity but the crazy crowd with maddening screams of ‘Modi Modi’ tells something even more.

Actually, much more than Mr. Modi’s personal abilities, this phenomenon can be explained in the urge of the immigrated Indians to assert their own identity in overseas societies. The Indians are regarded to be successful, competent, hard-working and affluent people that have established themselves as responsible, peace-loving communities in foreign societies. But, because of an incompetent political leadership at home, India was unable to carve out a dominant role for itself in international affairs. The numerically growing overseas community wanted a strong resurgent India that could be seen with respect and awe in global community. The Americans citizens are respected and held in awe the world over because of the political might of the United States.

It was a widely held belief among Indians that India has got what it takes to become a global superpower but is held back because of a lackluster, pusillanimous political leadership. Now, with the arrival of Narendra Modi, supported by a ruthless majority in parliament, the global community sat up to take note of this man’s words and deeds with dead seriousness. With growing clout of Modi, the clout of India grew stronger filling the hearts of overseas Indians with pride and optimism. Arranging a train from Melbourne to Sydney and naming it Modi Express was a symbolic expression of a subtle aggression that Indian community was champing at the bit to display since the days of racial attacks on Indians in Australia. It is worth recalling that Melbourne, the city with highest concentration of Indian students’ population, was the biggest centre of attacks on Indians. Now, a resurgent India under the puissant leadership of Modi, has given them the opportunity to celebrate their dormant aggression that intends to assert their existence in an indifferent society. That society will no longer remain indifferent; now it has been nudged into believing that Indians are a formidable community powered by the growing global political strength of their country in the comity of nations.

So, the next time when the Australians sing their national anthem, saying

Vikram Thapar or Vickey, as he was known in the socialites circle, was one of the most colourful personalities of the contemporary India.

He was a successful business tycoon who owned one of the biggest media conglomerates of India – ‘The Newswire Media Ltd.’ which had its presence in television, print media, internet portals and entertainment business in the country. Besides, he ran one of the biggest event management concerns of India which organized many national-international events like film festivals, beauty pageants, music concerts and cultural events. He was also into field of education and he owned a network of Management and Mass Communication education institutions across many cities. Recently, he had taken interests in production business of Bollywood movies as well.

‘The Newswire Ltd’ was known mainly for its Television and Newspaper business. It ran a news channel “Suchh” in Hindi which meant ‘truth’. It had the motto: ‘Nothing but Truth’. The ‘Suchh’ was the highest watched private news channel of India. The Group also had an entertainment channel ‘Family’, which produced and showed sop-operas in Hindi. Besides that, Vikram Thapar had purchased one of the oldest newspapers of India ‘The Indian Mirror’, which was in a dying state and in a span of 10 years, made it to be one of the highest selling dailies.

Vikram Thapar was sharp, witty, articulate and perspicacious who was known for his business acumen and audacious decisions.

‘The Newswire’ group was known for hiring the best professional in their respective fields and for paying them the best.

Vickey Thapar, who was a handsome man in his early 50’s, had a knack of being in news for all the favourable reasons. He carried an ubersexual image and spent fortunes on his looks and fitness. He was known for his flamboyant and hedonistic life styles. He was an idol for the socialites and was loved in the women’s circles. He had his own PR men working on innovative ideas around him. Recently, as per a society magazine survey, he was voted to be the man with the sexiest chest. The survey was carried on a sample of upper and upper-middle class society women of 6 biggest cities of India. The survey though disputed, had managed to give him a power position in the fashionable women’s circle.

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An excerpt of a conversation between a young-recruit and Vickey Thapar:

A young recruit asked from Vickey – “Mr. Thapar, how similar or different will be the ‘Mirror News’ from the ‘Suchh’?”

“In what respect?” Asked Vickey.

“Well, will it be a symbol of justice, ethics and moralities or it will be…”

“It will be a symbol of news.” He cut him short.

“Or that of an evil as is ‘The Suchh’?” He was bolder in his questions.

Vikram Thapar frowned; so did the faculty members and most of the other people present there. Devanjali looked at Thapar with bemusement.

“Do you doubt the fact that ‘The Suchh News’ has been a symbol of success?” Vikram asked, his frown intact.

The young man continued, unwavered – “Mr. Thapar, People dislike you as well as your news channel and take both as symbols of evil.”

Everyone present was stunned. The senior associates of Vickey tried to caution the young man by raising hands, but Vikram Thapar intervened –“No, no; that’s fine with me. I hate people who don’t differ with me when they need to. Yes, young man?”

“People think you’re trying to destroy everything that is good in society and trying to promote everything that is inimical to it. Well, I’m sorry to say but, Mr. Thapar, people hate you and your media policies.”

It was an uneasy silence for a moment. No one had ever heard any such thing being said on Vikram Thapar’s face.

Devanjali found it interesting. Unlike everyone, she was focussed on Vikram Thapar.

“Do they really?” Vikram’s countenance changed from stiffness to amusement – “How many of you present here believe that people hate me?”

No one made any indication to say anything except the young man who still sounded unapologetic – “That’s the general perception, Mr. Thapar.”

Vikram Thapar looked at the boy’s name plate – ‘Karan Kartikeyan’

“That’s not, Karan.” He countered –“It hurts me to see an intelligent young man fooling himself into the belief that the people hate me. It’s a ridiculous blunder which the millions in this country so blissfully do – the blunder of judging things at their face value. It’s a contemptuous act of misjudgement that stands unpardonable. Dear trainees, it’s exactly this kind of misjudgement which we want you to refrain from.”

All of his associates nodded in agreement.

Vikram came to his point – “People don’t hate me, Karan. The fact of the matter is that they’re envious – they’re envious of me, they’re envious of you and they’re envious of what we all are. Dear friends, in our society envy is considered uncultured; but whining is not, especially when it comes to whine against a successful person like me, it’s more of a social act; it wins you friends. That’s why people whine.”

“Well, Ms Devanjali what do you think of me?” Vikram Thapar was abrupt and pointed in his question.

Devanjali looked at him trying to understand the orientation of his question. She said – “Well, people think of you as a successful media magnet who…”

“What do you think of me?” He interrupted her half-way, “Honestly; shed your
inhibitions.”

She looked at him and on the face of his stare, said – “Well, I think you’re a man with a great sense of marketing skills but with least sense of journalistic abilities; someone who knows how to sell his news without understanding what the news actually means.”

“That’s the envy, young woman. People are jealous of my success. Mankind is
blessed with the wonderful ability to camouflage its jealousy and envy under a more
acceptable social emotion called hate. People express their hate through one of those
many saleable virtues called ethics, values and morality.”

Devanjali looked at him and listened silently, her side wisps waving slowly
in the morning breeze coming from across the Potomac river.

“The more they envy the more I prosper because I understand that at the root
of their jealousy lies the sense of their own inferiority…an inferiority that is born out of their inability to rise over their incompetence; they know well that they can’t
compete with me or stop my growth.”

“Well…” She asked, her head still slanted, “how does it matter what do I think of you?”

He smiled at her and took a long breath – “It matters; well, to be specific, I
want you to join my group and to work with me.”

Now, her head was straightened. She looked startled.

“I want you to join the ‘Newswire Group’ as Editor-in-Chief of a new TV news channel in English – ‘The Mirror News’, which I have been planning in India.”

Before she could open her mouth to say anything, he added – “Well, it’s my
pleasure to remind you that as per our management policy we pay the best in the
industry and better than the best someone like you could imagine for herself.”

For any journalist in her position, the offer was breathtaking.

“Why do you want me to join ‘The Mirror News’?”

“It’s because of the opposites we share.” He grinned – “Well, I think of you
exactly the opposite of what you think of me.”

She raised her brows.

“I think of you as a woman with great sense of journalistic abilities but with
little sense of marketing skills; someone who understands news better than many of
her colleagues twice her age, though, she might not be sure to sell it.”

“So, you want to make a team?”

“It makes a great journalistic sense, doesn’t it?”

“Say commercial sense, Mr. Thapar.”

“We can make it synonymous.”

Devanjali fell silent.

A man who symbolized many ills that the media was afflicted with, a man who
transgressed the inviolable codes of ethics, a man who violated each and every tenets
of journalism and a man who was anti-thesis of everything she had held to be sacred
and imperative in her profession was sitting in front of her asking her to team up.

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Who was Vikram Thapar?

Interested…? Follow the post in ‘Curtain Raiser’ to know more about the coming fiction “DEMOCRACY 2.0”.

……At the time, there were two main political alliances in the country – the ruling alliance and the opposition alliances. They formed two magnetic poles for the existing political elites of the country who kept drifting towards these two poles as per their convenience during or after a general election. These political elites had divided themselves into different political parties.

The ruling alliance was headed by its main political party, The National Convention Party.

‘The National Convention Party’, or more popularly the Convention Party, was the biggest national party that ran its government across many Indian states and had the highest number of Members in the Parliament. The opposition alliance was led by the ‘Bharatvadi Janhit Party’ or more popularly, the Janhit Party. These 2 parties formed the two opposite poles of political magnet around which many other regional parties coalesced.

Outside these 2 alliances were the leftists, the Indian Communist Party (ICP) which, in association with some other regional parties, had formed a feeble third alliance called ‘The Third Front’. The Third Front, like the third eye of Shiva, got active only during turmoil of grave political nature. It was hardly visible on the political map of the nation but its resonance was well audible through the emanating sound bites of its leaders. However, the parties clustering around the third pole displayed the best political wisdom – they were no one’s eternal enemies, no one’s perpetual friends.

The general election happened after every five years.

The National Convention Party of the ruling alliance was a party which had ruled the centre for most part of the last six decades.

Although all through this long time the Convention Party had earned many cheers and boos to its credit, the analysts felt tempted to analyse its decades of rules on a single parameter – that, it was controlled all along by one single family, known as ‘The Sarvapriya Family’. They believed that the authority of this family over party was total and unchallenged. The members of the party were organized around the conviction that ‘The Family’ possessed the divine right to rule – a right which was considered sacrosanct and indisputable.

This faith had emanated from a not-so-unfounded belief that masses in the interiors of the rural India and in the dusty bylanes of towns and cities venerated ‘The Family’. Generations of Indians had inherited this feeling for ‘The Family’ as an ideological legacy from their ancestors. Maybe somewhere deep in the psyche of the Indians, an infatuation for the dynastic monarchy still lingered.

True republicans are a minority in society; the majority of men and women have a secret longing for a romantic authority over their destinies.

However, this unflinching faith among the Convention Party members in the authority of ‘The Family’ had made sycophancy a coveted virtue which was institutionalized by the material and emotional rewards it ensured to them. Sycophancy was equated with the virtue of loyalty; the dividing line between the two didn’t exist for the Conventionists.

However, the analysts believed that the fabled grip of ‘The Family’ over the masses was no longer undiluted. The mesmerising hold of The Family over the masses in the past decades had been mainly due to the charismatic leadership and persona of then leaders; such persona was built around carefully-crafted sloganeerings. However, the same charisma was no longer visible in the existing leadership, though sloganeering still ruled the day.

In the given backdrop, the spate of scams, scandals and corruption stories had further shaken the confidence of even the diehard proponents of the party. The government was dragged into a series of court cases, and it had to suffer many reverses in many of those cases.

The prestige of the National Convention Party had taken a severe beating.

Yet, the party leaders had put up brave faces. They knew that the battle had two fronts – one lied in courtrooms and the other lied in the minds of the people. They knew the right ways to fight both the battles. They had a battery of lawyers and they deployed the best among them to fight it out at both the fronts. Donning the black in day times, these gentlemen defended the government in the courtrooms and wore a Chickan kurta at the panel of the ‘Crossfire’ in the night to demolish the arguments and accusations of the opposition leaders, who sounded like prosecution lawyers.

The Conventionists had developed the art of defending all these accusations and much more through the twin powers of sophism and polemics; they had raised this art to an awesome height of craftsmanship.

Much in the same way as in the profession of law, politics has been one such field where a conscientious approach is a recipe to disaster whereas polemics and sophistries are the virtues which win the battle. The more you have these, the more leverage you acquire in nagging circumstances.

No wonder why the Convention Party kept so many lawyers in their folds.

Presently, the onerous job of putting the Convention Party back to its charismatic old days was taken up by the young scion of The Family, Mr. Rohan Sarvapriya, who, the analysts believed, was destined to be the next ruler of the nation by default.

Mr. Rohan Sarvapriya was fortunate to get a battalion of able men and women working for the party. Although a great many of them were veterans in the party, serving it from the time when Mr. Sarvapriya was not even born, they never aspired to take the top job of heading the government or the party.

Loyalty commands subservience.

Many of these veterans, with immense experience behind them, could have become a far better choice for the top job but they never ventured to nurture such dreams. To them, ‘The Family’ always came before the nation! These were the men and women who had limited their dreams.

Those who limit their dreams, limit their capacities.

These seniors publicly craved to be taken care of by the young scion, but the later was aware of the pitfalls. Like Bairam Khan and his seasoned generals, who zealously guarded the Moughal crown till Jalalluddin Akbar was fit enough to wear it, the Convention Party generals led by its Prime Minister often knelt down in complaisance to offer the crown to the ‘crown prince’ who they believed was its rightful owner and by the time fit enough to wear it. But, unlike Jalalluddin who accepted the offer despite being a political greenhorn at the time, the crown prince used to jump over the bent heads of his men and walk away with a wry smile. He informed them that such a time had yet not arrived; maybe not till the scams and scandals were swept under carpet and out of public memory. He was not there to clean the muck, though publicly he always had to say the opposite.

Ah, the crown!

The crown, because of some knotty circumstances, had fallen into the custody of the party generals and under the circumstances a gentleman was trapped in becoming the party’s unintended Prime Minister….

Siddhanta Sharan had a very wanting childhood which had come to him as the tragic legacy of a faded aristocracy. Through the thick of his penurious childhood days in his village, he studied at his village school where everyone knew he was special. Meandering through the difficulties of his life he gets few helps which enables him to reach higher academic echelons and get many academic laurels on the way. Soon, recognition came and so did job offers worth millions of dollars in compensation. But, he was not to freak out on those money nor he wished to sit on his laurels for long; he was dreaming of a different and more meaningful future.

Wandering around with his inner turmoil, he lands into the Harvard Business School drawn by the rigours of a management programme. Just then, he hears of a bloody massacre happened in the neighboured of his village as fall-out of a long-standing struggle between private armies of the landed castes and the Maoists. He thinks of a solution and, quitting Harvard mid-way, he comes back to his village. Now, he had defined himself and his goals; it was the call of his destinity. He flew down from Harvard to his village – one of the most underdeveloped region in the hinterlands of Ganges – and rolls out his unique solution that he calls ‘Nano-socionomics’.

Within a span of three years, he turns the whole area into a hot-bed of development, growth and prosperity, thanks to his great postulates of ‘Nano-socionomics’ that visualized the socio-economic reconstruction of the villages through truly democratic means. To top it, by his unique skills, he manages to bridge the status differentiation of rural society and ensures total caste-equality in areas under his influence.

His unbelievable achievements make Maoism and caste wars fade into irrelevance. He is hailed in national-international media as the ‘Miracle Man’ and is honoured with many prestigious awards. The Maoists retaliate and abduct him but, with his profound intellectual capacity and with his great argumentative skills, Siddhanta managed an ideological coup in the Maoist camp leading not only to the annihilation of the Maoists’ top rank but also to the ideological defeat of the very philosophy of Maoism in India.

Now he focussed himself to a far bigger challenge – the reconstruction of Indian democracy and society. He was blessed to have the company of Aditya, the maverick educationist, who joined hands with him to open ‘The Ara Club’, the secret club. Aditya also brought Devanjali into the mission and soon they were working out a road map. But, Siddhanta was planning a movement full with wonderful ideas of change; he calls it a Post-Gandhian’ movement. Soon, the movement snowballed into a pan-Indian revolution. The waves of the revolution not only swept away the corrupt government of the day but went a long way into rejuvenating the tattered moral fabric of the nation.

The revolution has a beautiful culmination – the volunteers of the Ara Club are voted into power for implementing their great reforms. As the nation is through huge celebrations all across, Siddhanta Sharan was no where to be seen.

Where was Siddhanta at the time? What he was doing in a remote village alone? What does he tell Devanjali about that particular moment and about his conspicuous absence from the celebration? What was it that made Devanjali go speechless?

Sitting in her news room, she acknowledged that in his moral and intellectual endowments, Siddhanta Sharan was still several notches above the rest of them.

He was SIDDHANTA SHARANA – a profound, subtle, enigmatic and discerning character whose ideological complexities and behavioural simplicity would blow you off your feet…

Keep following the post for further exerpts from upcoming fiction, ‘DEMOCRACY 2.0.’

Meet ADITYA SRIVASTAVA, one of the two male protagonists who play the centre role in the story.

Aditya Srivastava, born and brought up in a traditional family at a north-Indian small town, lives his childhood amidst a rich and culturally fulfilling family atmosphere, full with siblings and caring individuals. Fed on the romantic notions of the civil services since his childhood, IAS happens to be his natural, and family-inspired, choice.

As he grows up, he is sent to Delhi University to prepare for the civil services examination where he soon becomes a popular name in the students circle. However, what he didn’t know was that by choosing the path of Civil Services, he had chosen a path of self-destruction till he meets with Devanjali, a girl from St Stephens, whose perspicacity at her age was a matter of folklores. Through her powerful analysis, she tries to convince him that IAS is not the solution; rather, it is a part of the problem. Very naturally, it clashed with Aditya’s small-town romanticism about the civil service. Aditya is in a fix. Yet, he goes ahead with his Mission-IAS. But, he’s overawed by the charm and intellectual prowess of Devanjali and falls secretly in love with her.

Eventually, Aditya is selected in IAS as the all-India topper, but before he could think of joining it, he gets a crude personal experience which jolts him out of his romanticism.

Now, that he has perceived the reality, he conceives a plan – a secret plan, to destroy this reality. He just needed few good men to execute his secret mission. He works out his strategies of a systemic change and prepares a detailed roadmap in his secret ARA CLUB that he sets up with his another maveric mate, Siddhanta. On the surface, he establishes himself in the society as a super-successful entrepreneur who is hailed as the ‘Education Baron of India’ and, more interestingly, the ‘Success Guru’.

However, before he could realize his secret mission, he gets drawn into a great socio-political crisis of the day – ‘Reservation’. After leading a student’s movement, he gets into the bottom of the problem and with his in-depth analysis he comes up with a novel solution that creates positive stir in society. He implements his solution through his secret network and the results are revolutionary. He becomes a hero and earns tremendous media support.

The politics of the day is mired by scams, scandals and controversies of unprecedented level. The govt of the day is bogged down by trust-deficit. Political scandals and sting operations are the order of the day. This backdrop gives Aditya and his team a right setting to bring forth their political agenda and they come up with their unique political and electoral reform proposals. People, fed up with scandals and let down by the existing political formations, give Aditya and his team a huge thumbs up.

The elections are round the corner. Aditya’s team is riding the wave of huge mass support. But, what will happen? Will the govt of the day keep quite? Well, they let the man corner the people’s goodwill or will they press the govt machinery to defame the man and to send him in political wilderness?

What role Devanjali gets to play in the drama? Can she do anything to save the man from incarceration and conspiracies? Can she let ‘Her Man’ sink to the quagmire of dirty politics? On top of it, can she get to say her passionate love for the man who she had once created as ‘the leader’?

Meet DEVANJALI, the female lead of my upcoming novel, “DEMOCRACY 2.0”. She’s a kind of a character that you might not have come across ever in your life – whether in literature, cinema or television.

There are few men and women on this planet who lead their lives with a mission. They carry a dream and display singular commitment to implement that dream in its totality. That commitment gives them a character that makes them special. Devanjali is one such special character.

But, what makes Devanjali special is her integrity. She’s uncompromising on a cause which she believes in and even the biggest of temptations can’t sway her – not even the might of the powerful Vikram Thapar, the biggest Moughal of the Indian media industry, who happens to be her employer.

Coming from an aristocratic lineage, she had a luxurious but melancholic childhood. With circumstances, she acquires her own ideas of life which makes her independent but headstrong. Even her IAS father, who happens to be one of the most powerful bureaucrats of his time, fails to convince her of his own importance in the system. Through her gifted power of discernment, she had understood the real character of the modern bureaucracy and the ills it had imported into the system. She was determined to stay away from it and hence, to the utter dismay of her father, she chooses journalism as her career and through it, she vows to create powerful leaders in society. She nurtures her own secret missions in life and needs few persons of character to execute her mission.

After studying journalism from USA, she comes back to India nurturing her two-fold mission: first, to create and promote real leaders in society and second, to cleanse the Indian media industry of its dirt and muck. She joins the biggest and the most controversial media house of India, the Newswire Ltd. To many in the industry the news happens to be scandalous. Then, nobody knew that it was a part of her long-term secret plan.

But, to her jubilation, Devanjali soon finds that the mission for reconstruction of the Indian democracy and society had already begun by few men with exceptional characters and that she she had already been made a part of it. The heroes of her dreams had taken lives.

With the mission of reconstruction of Indian politics and society well under way, Devanjali directs her focus on Vikram Thapar and on the affairs of the ‘Newswire Ltd’. Soon, she discovers an intricate network of dirty interests ensnaring the system where politicians, business houses, opinion leaders and lobbyists had held the political-bureaucratic system of India to a ransom. She finds that Vikram Thapar and his media house had its own intelligent role to play in the game. Now, her task was cut out; she would destroy the man and the ills he’d infused in the system. With her persistence and strong-headed approach, she exposes the nexus and, before she could fight Vikram Thapar legally, the man found a safer and a far more respectable escape route out of his desperate situation – suicide; he kills himself which symbolizes the cleansing act of all dirty influences in media. Her giant act sends a powerful message to the media fraternity that when it comes to fighting corruption in its own backyard, the media houses can’t keep their heads buried in sand.

Now, that her personal mission is fulfilled, will Devanjali get the opportunity to express her love for the man, who she had once created and who comes out to be the real hero of the great movement for the reconstruction of democratic India?

Welcome to the secret courtyard of the Ara Club, the Avante Garde of a democratic revolution…

This is a secret club out in the boondocks created by some of the finest professionals of India who carry a dream to bring about a democratic revolution in the nation. It will be a revolution that will refine the existing political-bureaucratic order and will establish a truly meant people’s democracy at its place where only the people and their collective interest will be supreme. This is a club whose members have girded up their loins to pull India out of its present politic-economic mayhem. Leaving their own cocoons of comforts, they’ve got into the middle with the urge to fight the crisis once for all.

They’d hang around till the end because they’ve fire in their bellies…and steel in their nerves

Interested in them?

Well, if the dreams of the members of the Ara Club find resonance with those of yours or if you find a similar dream incubating somewhere in the corner of your mind, follow this post.